Worship in HD

Scott McClellan from Collide recently posed the question, “Technology is…“, asking readers to fill in the blank.  Not one to stand back from debate, I threw my hat in the ring.  Technology is … not enough.

You may remember my recent post (oddly enough, in response to Scott’s interview response on technology in the church) talking about whether or not technology can “save the church.”  I said it then and I’ll say it now: It’s all about the message.

Technology is wonderful, it’s powerful, it’s transforming; but it’s not enough.  Technology has changed our way of life, how we see ourselves, how we see each other; but it’s not enough.  Technology draws crowds and helps us speak in ways we could not speak before, but it’s not enough.

Unless we get the message right, unless we understand what binds us together in this life, technology is just noise.  It’s static.  It’s a distraction from the truth.  It’s not enough.

To piggyback on our past post, “Designing a Worship Service“, designing a worship service should happen with a dedicated, closed team of staff or volunteers (as the case may be).  There are four things I believe you need to do in order to effectively design your worship service:

1. Don’t only look to the future, you need to examine the past.  I think a meeting to design a worship service should start with this.  You need to look at what you’ve done before, how it was received, and whether or not you felt the desired goal was accomplished.  Start with the last month or just the last week.  Should you try that order again?  Should that new idea be a regular part of the service?  What went wrong?  What went right?  Let your past experiences guide your team in your pursuit of excellence.
2. Make sure to get the right people together.  Your team should be small, and should consist of people who control all aspects of the service.  Let your team members’ passion come forward, and let them each challenge the group to continually improve every aspect of the service.
3. Don’t leave God out of the equation.  It’s easy to be focused on the flow of creativity and ideas when putting together a worship service.  Don’t get me wrong, this is a time to be creative; but it is also a time to sense God’s leading in choosing songs, skits, videos, and all other aspects of the service.
4. Agree on a specific goal, an objective, for each service.  This may come from the sermon, or it may come from somewhere else like a powerful worship song, a touching video, or a compelling skit.  I believe you should design your service around that single, Main Idea .

I have a great team of volunteers who help to run our visuals.  But with volunteers often comes unique management challenges.  For instance, someone can understand how to use our system and can be very good at it, but they just don’t have a knack for choosing relevant backgrounds for a service.

I’m not sure if anyone else has this problem, but very quickly I learned that you can’t leave church worship background selection up to the individual running the program on a particular Sunday. Why? I’ve seen everything from Winter background graphics on hymns in Spring to Christmas background graphics in June (ok, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration). And now that we’ve moved to widescreen format, choosing the right worship backgrounds is even more difficult. That’s why I decided to review and approve each Sunday’s schedule. There are a few ways to do this:

1. Fortunately, EasyWorship allows you to load their software on other computers for a single church’s use. Thanks to technology, I can get emailed the schedule half done, select the backgrounds, and send it to whoever does the next Sunday – all from the comfort of my house.  But then I have to rely on someone remembering to email me the schedule.
2. My preference is remote access to the PC running EasyWorship.  On Friday or Saturday, I can access the PC quickly (we use LogMeIn) and review the backgrounds for Sunday.
3. The least tech-savvy method would be to check it Sunday morning before church.  Probably the easiest, too.  But it’s more fun to try to use technology, right?

How do you manage your “schedule”?

I read an interesting article from the Midnight Oil guys recently about the Main Idea.   The challenge they give is a good one: “What is the single, central theme derived from the scriptural text that is the driving concept for every element in the service?”

Do you do this?  You should be asking yourselves several questions when you put together a worship service (and yes, you should have a team who “puts together the service”):

• Why are we here?
• Why are we HERE?
• What do we feel God wants us to focus on today?
• How can we interweave that theme into every aspect of the service?  Announcements?  Worship songs?  Worship backgrounds?  Challenge?  Videos?

These ideas, these concepts, are what all great churches do, and they are all part of pursuing excellence.  A well-designed service is just that - well designed.  Of course, we need to leave room for God’s hand to work in and through us spontaneously, and He will.  But our worship should always be purposeful.

“Excellence is when media becomes a transparent aspect of the service & not the focal point.”  -Mike Apple

Thanks to WorshipVJ for that quote from his ECHO presentation.

Craig Groeschel had a few interesting posts over at swerve about the final 10%.  It’s easy to give 90% and feel you’ve done better than most, which may be true.  “In my friendships, if I’m giving 90% of my best, most would be satisfied with my commitment”, he says. Craig goes on to point out that Jesus taught us to go the extra mile, to “give our coat as well as our shirt.”

This is a great application to church media.  Although in this instance Craig was talking about relationships, this is a great application for life and ministry.  The last 10% is often the most difficult, but it circles back to my earlier post on pursuing excellence.  Because for us, involved in frontline ministry (yes, I consider church media frontline), the difference between 90 and 100 is the difference between mediocrity and excellence.

How do you pursue the final 10%?  What do you measure your success by?

So why is the “right” background so important? Well, for the congregation the praise and worship can be a very personal, intense experience. Our goal as a video team is to eliminate distractions and become “invisible”.  At the same time I think the background can serve to enhance the worship experience. For instance, we have two backgrounds I like using that have the shadow of someone lifting their hands in praise. The first Sunday I used this background was on the song, “Thank you Lord”.  As the music builds, we sing “With an outstretched arm, I will bless your name!” Now, my goal is not to count the number of people with their hands raised, we don’t measure our success outwardly.  But the key here is relevancy.  The background was relevant to the song - to the lyrics.

Another example is the song “Made to Worship”. It starts out with the line “Before the day, before the light, before the world revolved around the sun”. I like to use a soft background because it’s a reflective song, and subtle sunrise images or abstracts will a similar look work really well for this.

Are your backgrounds relevant?

I find it so interesting that there is such a blend of styles of visuals among churches.  Here are just some of the many options a church has to consider overall or just every Sunday:

• Resolution
• Software
• Motions versus stills
• Nature versus abstract
• Loud versus subtle
• Praise versus reflective

Whatever you decide, I believe you need consistency.  It’s not a good idea to do all motions one week, then all stills the next; all nature shots one week and a bunch of loud abstract images the next.  Even during the service, there should be a methodology to your background selections and use of visual aids.

All good worship leaders prayerfully choose songs for each “slot” in the service - the order is meticulous.  Why should the visual background supporting that song be chosen any differently?

Sometimes it’s the little things that help to add that extra little piece of professionalism and transparency. Some of these may be common sense to some, but I think they still need mentioned. If you’re working with various still backgrounds, here are five pointers that contribute to excellence:

1. I always strive for the “perfect service”.  Spend some time in prayer, and think about your transitions and the schedule - all before the service starts.  You don’t want people to notice that there is a person running visuals.
2. Use the same background image for back-to-back songs. This avoids the distraction of changing images, especially if the images are unrelated to a theme.
3. Make your transitions meaningful (and transparent to the worshippers).  Un-black the screen revealing the background as soon as the musicians start playing a new set of songs. Reveal the words a few seconds before they are to be sung. This requires that you know the song, but it’s really not that hard.
4. Stay on top of the service, especially for the pastor.  This should go without saying, but I always tell guest speakers that I don’t want them to request a slide.  You should follow along on an outline (which they should provide you), and bring up the appropriate slide as they mention it.  This can’t always be done, but it’s certainly something to strive for.
5. Understand the flow of the service, and pick your backgrounds accordingly.  Most worship services start the music out with outward praise, and then move toward a more reflective, inward worship as people prepare their hearts for the message.  Use your bright, busier backgrounds at the beginning, and tone it down as you go along.  You don’t want distractions as things slow down and people become reflective.  The song often will dictate this as well.

They sound simple and possibly even trivial, but if you don’t purposefully set out to pursue excellence and pay attention to the small details, the flow can seem choppy and the visuals can become a road block to enhancing the worship experience.

I came across an interesting blog post by Stephen Proctor over at WorshipVJ about the reasons for using visual media in worship. You can read his post here, but a few things he mentions NOT to use visual media in worship for:

• Entertainment
• Personal satisfaction of the visual enthusiast
• Keeping young people interested
• Because everyone else is doing it

His whole list is a bit amusing, but also very true.  I like to think of the visuals as a tool to enhance the worship experience.  For the congregation, the praise and worship can be a very personal, intense experience – between each person and God. Our goal as a video team is to eliminate distractions and become “invisible”, but at the same time I think using visuals serves to even enhance the worship experience.

One more thing I’ll point out is that we all learn one of three ways - Auditory, Kinesthetic, and Visual (yes, you are one of those).  These also translate over to how we experience life on a personal level.  For many people just hearing the music is enough to move them.  For others, they need to lift their hands or move around, be active and participate.  And the last group, those who experience life visually, are especially moved by an appropriate visual aid to their worship experience.  

Oh, and they all need to know the words in order to sing.  :)